The Bin Ladens

“It is well known that there are two elements of fighting,” Osama said later. “There is the fighting itself and then there is the financial element, such as buying weapons. This is emphasized in many verses of the Koran, such as the following: ‘God has purchased the persons and possessions of the believers in return for the Garden.’”³

Salem turned to a German friend with an Afghan connection: Thomas Dietrich. They had first met in Cairo; Dietrich was an amateur pilot on vacation, and they fell into a friendship centered on flying. As a boy, Dietrich had lived in Kabul; his father was a West German foreign aid official. He became a fixture in Salem’s European entourage. In the mid-1980s, he was enrolled at a university in Stuttgart, but he found time to ski and fly with Salem and some of his brothers and sisters, particularly at resorts in the Alps.

At Offley Chase, his estate outside London, Salem summoned Dietrich to his room. “We need to help my brother,” Salem told him, as Dietrich recalled it.

“You’ve got many of them.”

Salem talked about Osama; Dietrich had heard some about him but not a lot. “He is now very religious,” Salem said. “He is now in Afghanistan, and the Russians are there. People are getting killed. And I know that you lived there—and you need to help him.” Osama had identified two priorities: missiles that could shoot down helicopters, and equipment that would allow Arab volunteers to manufacture ammunition for AK-47 assault rifles, by filling spent shells with new rounds.⁴

The war was intensifying. After a policy review in the spring of 1985, the United States decided secretly to escalate its support for the Afghan mujaheddin; for the first time, the U.S. identified victory over the occupying Soviet army as an objective. The CIA rapidly increased the quantity and quality of the weapons it sent in through Pakistan. The Soviets introduced more aggressive tactics as well, ordering elite helicopter-borne Special Forces units, called Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan; these assault troops flew raids against rebel supply lines and wreaked havoc along the Pakistan border. To thwart the Spetsnaz, the CIA agreed in 1986 to send heat-seeking U.S.-made Stinger missiles to the Afghans; the missiles were particularly lethal against helicopters. The initial shipments occurred during the first half of the year, just as Osama was moving with his family to Peshawar. An Afghan commander fired the first Stingers on the Afghan battlefield in September, at Jalalabad. The missiles destroyed several Soviet helicopters that day, and they quickly acquired an almost mythical reputation for potency among both the mujaheddin and the Soviets.⁵

Separately, at some point during this period (it is not clear when), the Reagan administration team supervising U.S. involvement with the Afghan war discussed whether to provide aid directly to the Arab volunteers based in Peshawar. The CIA ran most of the secret war from day to day, but an interagency group at the White House, chaired by Assistant Undersecretary of Defense Michael Pillsbury, decided on the war’s broader policies. Twice Pillsbury flew by helicopter to the Afghan frontier to review training facilities and to meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, two rebel leaders who were particularly close to the Arabs. During these meetings, Pillsbury asked about the military effectiveness of the Arab volunteers. He concluded, he recalled, that the Afghan commanders didn’t want aid or supplies to be diverted to the Arabs; the Afghans saw these relatively small bands of shaheen, or “martyrs,” as righteous warriors but also as sacrificial pawns of marginal military value. The Afghans wanted all the weapons for themselves.⁶

After he received Osama’s requests, Salem made several attempts to contact the Pentagon to see if he could arrange to supply Osama with portable missiles, according to a business partner who participated in these inquiries. Salem tried to locate the right person in the American defense bureaucracy, but he was unsuccessful, the partner said. It is not clear whether the Reagan administration ever made a formal decision to refuse to supply weapons to the Arab volunteers—no such document or account has ever surfaced—but conclusions such as those formed by Pillsbury after his inquiries in Pakistan clearly influenced American thinking about the matter. Pillsbury said he knew of no explicit decision to refuse aid to the Arab volunteers and that he would have known if such a decision had been made; still, they were not a priority.

Salem felt he had no recourse but to use the private arms market, according to interviews with Dietrich and two other individuals in the private sector who joined discussions with Salem about supplying arms to Osama. Salem did receive some financial support from the Saudi government, according to these individuals, but he received no known aid from the United States. As Dietrich recalled it: “The problem was there was no clearance from any of the Western governments” to supply the Arab volunteers “with anti-aircraft missiles.”⁷

Dietrich had contacts at Heckler & Koch, the German arms manufacturer. Through them, Dietrich recalled, he arranged several meetings between Salem and salesmen at the firm who specialized in ammunition and rifle manufacturing. A second partner of Salem confirmed these negotiations; the partner said he warned Salem to not get involved, because it was a private transaction of uncertain legality, but that Salem went ahead anyway.⁸

It was not entirely clear to Dietrich why Osama wanted to make his own bullets. Like many of the mujaheddin, his volunteers carried mainly Chinese-made assault rifles based on a Soviet design; Pakistani markets were awash with ammunition for these guns. Osama seemed in part to regard remanufacture from spent shells as some sort of virtuous, efficient cottage industry; it was also the sort of technology that was sometimes advertised in the pages of mercenary magazines like Soldier of Fortune. Dietrich found an arms salesman who understood the process and flew with him to Dubai to meet with Salem and Osama. “We sat together and said, ‘It does not really make sense to refill the bullets there,’” Dietrich recalled. The technical problems were too great. The arms salesman suggested that Osama simply purchase the ammunition he needed from suppliers they could locate in South America.

To discuss buying missiles, Osama flew to London and met with Salem, Dietrich, and Dietrich’s contacts in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, according to Dietrich. They met two or three times at the hotel over a period of six to eight weeks during 1986, he said. Before one meeting, Salem and Dietrich were horsing around in their usual way. As they walked from one room of the suite into a second room, where Osama was waiting, Salem admonished, “Don’t do any jokes with my brother. He’s very religious.”

Ultimately Dietrich heard that his contacts had helped arrange for the purchase in South America of both Russian-made SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles and ammunition for Chinese-made AK-47 rifles; the missiles and bullets were shipped to Karachi. One snag was that Osama’s sponsors in the transaction wanted to pay for the ammunition not with cash, but with crude oil. According to Dietrich, they expected the seller to accept “just a tanker offshore, which was not easy to accomplish because a company like Heckler & Koch, they don’t want oil, they want money.”⁹

Dietrich had “no idea” where the money or oil for these arms purchases originated. The best available evidence suggests it probably came at least in part from the Saudi government. Certainly Salem and Osama were working in concert with official Saudi policy at this time. Also, Osama’s arms purchases, as described by Dietrich, seem to fit inside a larger pattern. In late 1985, the Saudi government entered into a multibillion-dollar arms deal with the British government, called Al-Yamamah. The transaction had a number of unconventional aspects. The Saudi government allocated between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand barrels of oil daily as barter currency to finance the purchase of major weapons systems from British companies. By using oil instead of cash, the Saudis were able to quietly evade official oil production caps imposed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to an authorized biography drawing on extensive interviews with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador in Washington. According to this account, the financing umbrella arranged for the Al-Yamamah deal also supported a number of Saudi Arabia’s covert anti-communist programs, including “arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan.”¹⁰

Other evidence about possible Saudi government participation in Osama’s arms supplies during this period is more fragmentary. Ahmed Badeeb, the Saudi intelligence officer who worked closely with Osama, acknowledged in an interview that he had purchased SA-7 missiles and supplied them to the Afghan fighters, although he did not specify Osama as a recipient. Salem also negotiated during this period to purchase weapons for Osama from South African arms dealers, according to two individuals familiar with those transactions. One individual who participated in these discussions, which were separate from those involving Dietrich, recalled that some of the funding came from the Saudi royal family.¹¹

During 1986, in Peshawar, Osama delivered his first known speeches denouncing the United States because of its support for Israel; as Osama later recalled his words, he preached that “Americans take our money and give it to the Jews, so they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” It is possible that his hostility toward America,